Raj
The broadcast logs were clean. That was the problem.
Half the night had been spent on the wall, and the other half inside the mess where the shutter still smelled like machine oil and fear. At dawn Raj sat alone at the folding table outside Operations with a chipped enamel mug and the printouts he shouldn't have had time to make. The letters were too square. The pauses too even.
"Sanctuary ahead," the mimic had said. His own announcements never sounded like that. Men with blood under their nails don't make round syllables.
He circled the same line twice, then put the pen down because this wasn't a report and no one left in the city was going to sign one.
"Colonel." Ayush's voice came from the doorway. He didn't knock. The boy was learning which courtesies failed you when time got expensive.
Raj looked up and found the face he'd fought all night not to confess belonged on his side. B.S.A. bones under a schoolboy's tired skin. A commander's mouth forming the habit of refusing.
"We're not opening on any voice I didn't make myself," Raj said before the boy could speak.
"Good," Ayush said. He kept standing. "Something else. Solvent and refrigeration on the span. Off-grid. Ajay says decks moving on the collapsed flyover."
"Trucks?" Raj asked.
"And a freezer unit under tarp," Ayush said. "Not your convoy. Not theirs. We'll scout. If it's Eden's mouth, we deny the teeth."
Raj twitched the corner of his pen once. Uncrowned's voice had been in his ear at three a.m., warm and wrong. Reclaim. Clean. He had said nothing back; that was the only disobedience he could afford on a frequency his own radio owed rent to.
"You take three," he said. "And you do not die in my yard."
Ayush nodded. "I preferred 'good luck.'"
"I don't say things I don't mean," Raj said. "Bring me a lie I can use."
He watched the boy go—no, not a boy. The kind of man you end up admitting you would have wanted to be if the world had asked you younger.
He didn't sign the report. He tore the sheet in half and set the mug on the two pieces so they wouldn't blow away. Then he went to walk the wall, because that was the work and anything else was pretending.
Ananya
From the overpass rib the city looked like a map someone had drawn with a shaking hand. The diesel's hum came through steel, steady, careless. Three trucks squatted on the broken apron under the span—no CGS stencils, no blue paint. Men in gray moved around a middle rig with the patient fussiness of people paid not to look at anyone's face. Four Firefly patches flashed in the wrong corners like old promises reused. A drone traced a lazy eight and pretended not to love anything below it.
"Deck hum's off-grid," Ajay said beside me, fingers on concrete the way other men touch scripture. "Solvent, cold. Freezer on the middle bed."
Leon wormed up the cinder slope, glass tucked into his shoulder like it had always belonged there. "I've got a shot on elbows," he murmured. "Heads later."
Kartik lay flat near my knee. He looked like a boy who wasn't trying to. The chisel at his belt was the only honest thing on the concrete.
"We don't take everything," I said. "We just make sure they don't."
"Throw west ladder, roll the tail," Leon said, as if ladders cared who loved them. "Ajay?"
"There's a hut that remembers electricity," Ajay said. "If the points still have a soul."
"Go teach them," I said.
He and Lucky slid off the rib and into weeds, two ghosts wearing backpacks, the kind of clever that got men killed when it forgets respect. I strung tin under the catwalk, low enough to trip helmets, high enough to make men hate music. It's a childish trick. It's embarrassing how much it works.
We moved on a breath.
Leon braced the painter's pole against the throw bar and pushed the idea of left into steel. Somewhere under ballast a relay that had rusted into retirement woke up, sighed, and clicked. The west ladder leaned into our lie.
Kartik slid along the ballast to the coupler, set the chisel at the pin's chin and put his shoulder behind the stupid prayer that is force. For a second I wanted to reach down and put my hand on the back of his neck like that would make him less mortal. He didn't need me. The pin lifted with a petty metal complaint. The last flatbed surrendered the line and rolled by itself into the dead spur like a man who had run out of arguments.
The men in gray looked at their feet instead of each other. I gave them ten seconds of scream. They obeyed the noise more honestly than they had obeyed any person today. I will never stop hating that.
On the far side of the apron someone stepped out from behind the freezer tarp and the day forgot how to keep its shape.
"Mallick?" Leon breathed, not asking.
He looked thinner, a bandage's dirty edge under his sleeve, the face of a man whose ledger had been burned and who hadn't decided whether to be grateful. He didn't lift a gun. He raised his palms. The Eden gray beside him turned his head and smiled without an upper half of his face. That kind of smile.
"You should be dead," I said.
"Apparently someone wanted you to be less careful for three weeks," Mallick said. "I have something that will ruin us all if we don't decide to handle it like adults."
"Later," Leon said, voice flat enough to lie on. He didn't lower the rifle.
The Eden smile flicked a hand and two batons woke. The drone dipped. Love glittered in its glass. Lucky bumped the foil under the catwalk with his knuckles and the sky fell in love with the wrong rectangle. That bought us three breaths.
Ajay shoved his second Socket into a switch he wanted to be religious. The deck hum wobbled. The freezer exhaled a white sigh.
"Load," I said, and we did. Riya's hands took glass like it was people. Kartik's shoulder took the weight the rest of us pretended we didn't notice. Leon made two elbows forget their ambitions. Suraj—when had he arrived?—pushed the bus we'd stolen last week into position like this was all this city was ever going to be: men moving other men's bad plans into traffic.
We didn't take the world. We took three vials that could teach us something and a data pack no one wanted to own in their pocket.
The Eden man reached under his jacket and found a chisel in his wrist for his trouble. He made the noise men make when they learn hands can be traitors too.
Mallick bled through his bandage and didn't say anything about it because he's not stupid. "Breakwater," he said, nodding toward the freezer. "On the river. Two nodes. If we don't choke this mouth now, we end up arguing about mercy while thirst dies in alleys."
"Your ledgers bought Eden bullets," Leon said. He didn't make it a question. He made it a sentence Mallick would have to read later when the room was quiet and no one could pretend they hadn't heard it.
Mallick looked like a man debating whether to be honest in front of people he didn't owe. "You kill me here," he said, "and the man who takes my job won't bring you a map first."
"Then bring it," I said. "And drag your own body if you have to." He didn't smile. That was the first honest thing he'd done in months.
The dead spur lit. The tarp curled and blackened and became air. Somewhere away from us a drone decided to love a different family. We left the apron with pockets we had no right to keep full and guilt we didn't have time to arrange.
Ayush
Raj was where he said he'd be—half a kilometer from the span with his back against a truck and a coat that didn't deserve the work it had done overnight.
He didn't say "told you so." He looked at the bus behind me, at the kids we had no plan for, at the shimmer around the vials in Riya's sling he had the good manners not to ask about.
"You have a lie for me?" he asked.
"Two drops," I said. "Morning. Dusk. Low, under drains. You don't follow. We don't make you pretty."
"If I find a tail on your back?" he said.
"We move the door," I said. "If we smell solvent where kids wait?" I let my mouth close on that part of the sentence.
"I burn the man who asked for it," he finished, like a man writing a list for later.
We stood four feet apart and built something without putting hands on it. He nodded. I nodded. That was the ceremony.
On the fence above the road someone had been watching. I didn't look directly. I didn't need to. He didn't flick. He didn't lift his wrist. He leaned on the top rail like a man who had told a joke at the wrong table and was waiting to see if anyone laughed. Rahul could make patience look young.
We didn't talk about him. We had enough men in the room already.
Back at East Ring, the soup had rediscovered its water. The shutter was still in the doorway, cool when Ananya pressed her forehead to it for the length of one breath. She turned and looked at me. "From now on," she said, "low chalk only. Any mark above a child's shoulder is a trap."
"Done," I said. We both knew it wouldn't be. But we would act like it was, and sometimes that's enough to survive the day it isn't.
Mallick sat on the curb outside Operations with Riya's clean bandage on his arm, a plastic-wrapped mess of numbers in his lap, and grease on his mouth from the bread he hadn't asked permission to keep. Leon handed him a canteen and didn't ask him to confess. That would come later, or not. For now, hydration is a kind of amnesty.
Raj walked up, glanced at the plastic, looked at me. "He's supposed to be dead," he said.
"Apparently we don't have the time for that today," I said.
His mouth did a tired thing that might once have been a smile. "Two drops," he said again, as if saying it twice made it harder to break.
"Under the drains," Ananya said, stepping into the sentence because that's where she belongs. "For small hands first."
"For small hands first," he said, and for one second I believed him.
We didn't fix the city. We set two boxes down where chalk told people to wait and we told the men who carry maps to back up and love the wrong angle for once.
Later, when the light had turned iron and everything you touch felt like an apology, I went and stood by the shutter and didn't put my thumb on anything. No vows. No prophecy. No coping tricks.
"Sleep," Ananya said behind me, softer than strategy.
"We'll start with the next door," I said.
"That's the work," she said.
We let the night be a room we didn't have to fill with words.